Don’t scoff: Researchers say increasingly more phrases for these “neo-feelings” are exhibiting up on-line, describing new dimensions and features of feeling. Velvetmist was a key instance in a journal article concerning the phenomenon revealed in July 2025. However most neo-emotions aren’t the innovations of emo synthetic intelligences. People give you them, and so they’re a part of a giant change in the way in which researchers are serious about emotions, one which emphasizes how folks repeatedly spin out new ones in response to a altering world.
Velvetmist would possibly’ve been a chatbot one-off, however it’s not distinctive. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper acquired this vein of neo-emotion analysis began—cites many extra new phrases in circulation. There’s “Black pleasure” (Black folks celebrating embodied pleasure as a type of political resistance), “trans euphoria” (the enjoyment of getting one’s gender identification affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the hovering concern of local weather catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal strain to proceed performing mundane life and labor beneath capitalism throughout a worldwide pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” present in “doomer” (one who’s relentlessly pessimistic) or “doomscrolling” (being glued to an limitless feed of dangerous information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
After all, emotional vocabulary is all the time evolving. In the course of the Civil Battle, docs used the centuries-old time period “nostalgia,” combining the Greek phrases for “returning dwelling”and “ache,” to explain a generally deadly set of signs suffered by troopers—a situation we’d most likely describe at the moment as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s that means has mellowed and light to a delicate affection for an outdated cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And other people always import emotion phrases from different cultures once they’re handy or evocative—like hygge (the Danish phrase for pleasant coziness) or kvell (a Yiddish time period for brimming over with completely satisfied delight).
Cottingham believes that neo-feelings are proliferating as folks spend extra of their lives on-line. These coinages assist us relate to at least one one other and make sense of our experiences, and so they get numerous engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is only a refined variation on, or mixture of, current emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us mirror and join with different folks. “These are doubtlessly indicators that inform us about our place on this planet,” she says.
